Thursday, November 08, 2018

Froot Loops

Throughout the medieval and early modern periods it was England’s role in European history to not take the extremes of religious and political posturing across the channel all that seriously. Or at least to domesticate them for local consumption in such a way that their more deleterious effects were muted.

I think this is basically what Edmund Burke was on about, and I recall a teacher at school delighting with the tale of how a shipload of flagellants were mocked on arrival in Dover at one of the many moments of supposedly impending apocalypse in the Middle Ages.

So today Barnier warns of ‘a Farage in every country’ as if Nigel were somehow patient zero for the coming populist plague. No, Farage is the Middle England version of extremism, familiar to all connoisseurs of our history...and if there is to be any benefit from Brexit, it will be in the manner that it restores the nation to its traditional state of relative cut-offness from continental froot loops.

Still, just by virtue of being English-speaking social media addicts, we run the risk of being blighted by those other froot loops across the pond.

The leading article of the Spectator today concerned itself with the possibility that the statue-pullers and witch hunters general have settled for good on English shores and advised that ‘a great many people worry that minority opinions are seen as being not just incorrect but criminal. The response ought to be to urge common sense: to fight against the hysteria but in a calm way.’

That would probably be the British way...but the author of the piece is not alone in having detected a greater tendency on all sides of the discourse to treat alternative viewpoints not just as incorrect, but also morally defective, and those that hold them as non-persons. Until we find a way to sensibly discourage said tendency, the USA will continue to act as a handy early warning system, I suppose.

The Spectator concludes: ‘In America, Democrats are now copying Trump’s tactics and the two sides are happiest trusting in their own virtue and the moral delinquency of the other. We have not yet reached that point in Britain.’